Cultural collaborators twisting through space and time

As a collaborative enterprise, Beyond Entropy - a two-year project that involves artists, scientists and architects - is unique and ambitious in scope. The project's theme is energy, and each collaborative trio - one expert from each discipline - has produced a piece of work relating to a different form of energy. Now in its final six months, the works produced by these collaborations have reached London, having previously stopped off at the Venice Biennale art show in Italy.

Arguably, one of the main benefits of art-science collaborations is the insights afforded to each party by the challenge of understanding others' fields. For architect Shin Egashira and cosmologist Andrew Jaffe of Imperial College London, whose Time Machine explores mechanical energy, this has certainly been the case: "Being forced to confront design problems was really useful," says Jaffe.

"The reverse is also true," says Egashira, who adds that he gained a new perspective after learning about his collaborator's work with the Planck telescope, designed to analyse the edge of the universe. "I still only understand half of what he does... but I now understand that there is another measurement about how we understand space."

They are exhibiting a modern take on author Alfred Jarry's How to Build a Time Machine, in which he postulated - based on a half-science, half-imaginary "pataphysics" - that a device which used the angular momentum generated by a gyroscope could remove a body from time. The contraptions exhibited - collections of gyroscopes attached to each other in various ways - when combined with a lot of notes on the making of them, go some way to explaining the accompanying pseudoscience. That's not really as important, though, as considering the implications of the piece were it to function.

The pair equipped one of their collections of gyroscopes with a camera that looks into the central timeless bubble, and transmits the resultant images externally. These images, they say, would allow the observer to look through time, much as we observe the past using telescopes. As Egashira says,"With time travel, the only way to communicate is through the visual."

(Image: Valerie Bennett, The Architectural Association School)

Building on Jarry's concept that "time is the fourth dimension of space, or a place differing essentially in its contents", the pair encourage us to remove ourselves from the present. Egashira's work with pinhole cameras, which he uses to highlight only long-lived characteristics of a place, resonates with this idea of providing a different scale to our experience of space, and thereby a new way of understanding it. The idea is fascinating.

Compared with the strength of the ideas behind Time Machine, the visual element of the exhibition is an underwhelming array of plywood wheels, metal mounts and a portion of bicycle mechanism. Indeed, it is unfortunate that due to space constraints in the gallery, the more impressive of the exhibits - a giant pinball machine that explores potential energy and a massive circular theremin for sound energy - are absent.

Many of the other projects are, like Time Machine, heavily concept-reliant for their wow factor. Looking at electrical energy, architect Vittorio Pizzigoni teamed up with artist Alberto Garutti and physicist Giuseppe Celardo to create a project that shows the diversity of roles in, and the sheer scale of, electricity production, by inviting into the same room 100 people who work in the industry.

Another piece, Responsibility of Energy, attempts to challenge our concept of space by showing the various scales of "breathing". The work includes an illustration of molecular orbitals and a photograph of a person, both hung on the wall above a floor-mounted metal platform onto which a time-lapse footage of melting Arctic ice is projected. The idea is to show that something so small as a molecule can have such grand-scale consequences, as carbon dioxide does in global warming. It seemed a pity, therefore, that instead of CO2, nitrogen was chosen to represent the atomic scale in the molecular orbitals. Beyond Entropy's director, Stefano Rabolli Pansera, told me that this was due to the more complicated nature of CO2's molecular orbitals, which presumably made them a less attractive prospect for visualisation.

The primary aim of the Beyond Entropy project was to be a research enterprise questioning our notion of energy. The resultant exhibition is sometimes inaccessible, but despite being hard work, the strength of the concepts on show means that it's worth persevering. The pay-off is a feast of ideas that twist your mind in directions you hitherto may not have explored.

Beyond Entropy is on show until 26 May at the Architectural Association School, London